Confucius He Says Flush The Toilet

May 1st, 2007

There are occasions when you want to roll Confucian precepts neat and tight and hang them low on the wall by the lavatory bowl. Last weekend was one of them. Taoists had held an ‘international forum’ on the Daodejing in Queen Elizabeth Stadium. When it comes to marque rankings, Taoism is rather the Datsun of world religions and only makes the list at all because there are an awful lot of Chinese about. Yet this gathering  was enough to bring down to Hong Kong Ye Xiaowen, director of State Administration for Religious Affairs, a curious post, akin to having a ballet group run by a blind man.

He met up with the increasingly sad and mediocre old soul Tung Chee hwa and out from both of them came the ritual, potty training patter about ‘social harmony’ which is one of those repeated attempts to layer a heartless, hypocritical and ultimately untruthful gloss over Chinese society and has me wishing Confucius not just in but down the toilet.   According to Ye, religion, or his leashed and castrated version of it, has been playing a positive role running around promoting social harmony lately and (if it knows what’s good for it) can do more. That, of course, is neither the primary nor the secondary or even the tertiary purpose of religion but then Ye is not thinking about worshipping God or purifying the inner self.

He is an old fashioned, hard nosed, Communist Party atheist with a career as a teaching cadre in sociology at Guizhou Provincial University. There, obscurity might have comfortably kept him had he not got involved with the China Youth Leauge in the United Front Work Department which turned out to be President Hu’s personal rocket ship to power and landed Ye at Religious Affairs and as an Alternate Member of the Central Committee. You want Mr. Ye’s take on religion shared with us in an essay in the People’s Daily in February? “Religion can summon the masses” he declares. With what, pray? Cheap opium? “Although religion is a form of social ideology, religions are simply reflections of social and economic conditions.” he concludes. I am not sure what that means or if they teach it in Guizhou but you can see why the Vatican doesn’t want him appointing bishops.Tung Chee wha probably had no idea what Ye was talking about but cop this load from Hong Kong’s dim shadow of Boris Yeltsin. “Love for harmony is an established value in Chinese society. Everything will develop when there is harmony. Only with harmony can there be business development and only with it can society develop.” It just doesn’t get deeper than that.If you don’t know the build up to this, Confucius said that the individual should sort himself out with right thoughts. Then he could lick the family into shape and, with all families reading from the same hymn book, the community would walk in a straight line , the state would function tickety-boo and the Emperor would be as pleased as punch, which is what we are all in it for, after all. Ye Xiaowen sees a lot in that which is good for him. The Taoist ethics of love, humility and simplicity are fine for Ye too as long as they are practiced without elaboration amongst Taoists. Buddhism is meant to be concerned about the inner self, and not politics and insofar as it has political interests in Hong Kong it has been bought out whole already by the Party. Islam involves an awful lot of coughing , shuffling and probably secret policemen but the charitable view of Christianity is that it is sidelined because it is not ‘home grown’ (and the Lord Buddha was born in Lam Tin?). There may be another reason. At least I hope there is. Jesus Christ said,“Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.  Matthew 10. 34-39
   Oh dear, oh dear what did happen to Confucius’ clockwork family?. Make of that what you will for yourself but it does not seem to hold many harmonics for Director Ye or poor old Tung Chee hwa.
   

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

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